Certifiable copy: the Turkish Rambo and the film that inspired it.
Photograph: PR

When we watch the stars at night, we see bright and fainted ones,” booms a Turkish voice over a grainy vision of outer space. “The brightest amongst them once… was Krypton.”

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I’m watching Superman, but it’s gone weird. The mythical planet of Krypton is clearly a plastic bauble, the kind you’d see on your nan’s Christmas tree. When Superman flies in from the left, it’s a Ken Barbie doll, his transparent plastic cape billowing in the gust of what turns out to be a hairdryer. This is Supermen Dönüyor, otherwise known as Turkish Superman. It might look like Michel Gondry after two bottles of red, but it’s actually a piece of cinematic history.

Yeşilçam was the name given to a rampant spate of DIY, low-budget films made in Turkey between the 1950s and 80s. A potent concoction of brazen amateur film-makers and non-existent copyright law made Turkey the home of one of the most prolific, bizarre and short-lived industries on the planet, one that thrived on ripping off every iconic movie you can think of – from Star Wars to The Exorcist – in the most bizarre way possible.

Everything seems pretty normal until all the dead people stand up and the film mutates into a flesh-eating zombie horror

“It all started when they were building the dams,” explains Cem Kaya, a young Turkish film director, raised in Germany, who is responsible for Remake, Remix, Rip-Off, a 2014 documentary about the Yeşilçam film industry. Far from the bright lights of 1950s Ankara and Istanbul, where an educated, westernised Turkish middle class preferred American and European movies, a sleeping giant audience was awakening as hydroelectric power brought electricity to the huge Anatolia region of Turkey for the first time. “These were mostly poor people living on the outskirts and in Anatolia,” Cem explains. “Whole families of kids, parents and grandparents could now go to the cinema and wanted Turkish films they could identify with.”

Yeşilçam emerged to meet this demand. Some of the directors would concentrate on remakes; others would bend US tropes to fit their own hallucinogenic storylines. In Tunç Basaran’s 1973 superhero flick Iron Fist: The Giants Are Coming, the mighty protagonist, Enver, wears a phantom’s mask, a Batman belt, has Superman’s crest on his chest, and can’t fly. All this while battling his sworn enemy: an evil Fu Manchu character who is, naturally, a transvestite in a wheelchair. Similarly, in Rampage, Çetin Inanç’s 1986 homage to Rambo, everything seems pretty normal until all the dead people stand up and the film mutates into a flesh-eating zombie horror.

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Despite the booming popularity of these films, cheap tickets meant that the budgets had to stay staggeringly low. But limitation bred innovation. Directors would cut tiny marks into film reels to make laser effects, for example, while camera dollies would slide on dampened soap bars and – in a film about smuggling – a lack of mules was overcome by painting donkeys white and simply filming them from a distance.

Kaya frantically searches his laptop to show me a particular photo of 1966 film Esrefpasali. “This is the great Yılmaz Güney,” he says of the Kurdish actor and film-maker. “He had a scene where he had to shoot a glass off his girlfriend’s head, William Tell-style. After much deliberation, he decided it would look most realistic if they just did it. So he fired a live shotgun at his girlfriend just to get the scene right. This is a great example of the crazy lengths these people would go to to make cinema.”

The Yeşilçam story may present itself as a charming, albeit immoral, tale of rampant intellectual-property abuse, but it’s actually more nuanced than that. These madcap directors exploited films that never had any chance of being seen by audiences outside of the major cities. They brought these stories and heroes to people who would otherwise have been ignored.

By 1980, however – the year Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was released – the climate had changed. A US-backed military coup had made Turkey a dangerous place to live. In turn, the domestic film industry was collapsing. It was precisely at this point that Inanç chose to embark on the most ambitious Yeşilçam project ever: The Man Who Saved The World.

An extravagant and perplexing story about rebellion, set in the now-colonised outer limits of space, The Man Who Saved The World featured robots, mummies, wizards, spaceship battles and, of course, loads of karate. “It was fantasy, so he needed special effects,” explains Kaya. “He decided to target Star Wars. They borrowed reels from a local cinema, sliced out the bits they wanted and gave it back. Imagine the guys who sat down to watch Star Wars in the cinema the next day; the tampered reels! It felt like revenge against the American wave of films sweeping through the capital’s cinemas. He took from the rich and showed it to the poor.”

Despite the innovative special effects, The Man Who Saved The World was a total failure. Nobody watched it. Meanwhile, the government installed after the coup opened the Turkish economy up to outside investment, and western (ie American) products flooded in. Yeşilçam was over. Most actors and directors, who were always paid small, one-off fees instead of royalties, found themselves poor and jobless. Private television channels were showing Yeşilçam films out of desperation for content, but only the production companies would see any money (one scriptwriter, Safa Onal, notoriously made it into the Guinness Book Of Records for having the most scripts turned into films, many of which he never made a penny from). Meanwhile, the bustling street in Istanbul where Yeşilçam first began was turned into a shopping centre.

For some, though, the dream refused to die. In the late 90s, a film club at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul began to show The Man Who Saves The World to students, introducing the weirdness of Yeşilçam to an intrigued new generation and turning Inanç’s flop into a cult movie. Soon, film buffs around the world were tracking down VHS copies of it, as well as Rampage and Iron Fist, appreciating their trashy, DIY aesthetic but also their ingenuity.

This September, Kaya and Inanç will travel together to Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, to show both of their films side by side, while Remake… will get a solo screening in London at the end of the month. For Inanç, the US industry he once borrowed so ruthlessly from is now becoming his biggest fan. And for Kaya, his fascination with the Yeşilçam tale is finally coming full circle. “Growing up as a Turkish child in Germany in the 80s, we were always isolated from real Turkish culture,” he says. “But my stepfather used to own a video store, and these films were my way in. We would watch two a night, while eating, talking, doing our homework. They were always around. So, taking this story around the world, and seeing others fall in love with these films, is something that’s very special to me.”